Animacies-Carpio

“Marriage of bodies and chemicals” 

I have to admit that reading Mel Chen’s book Animacies was a challenging and fascinating experience. The wide range of themes, methods, engagements involving the notion of animacy demanded an active and open reading exercise.  I was specifically looking for a lengthy and precise definition of the term or an explanation of how intersectionality (race, disability, sexuality) could be applied to other contexts, however “the alchemical magic” presented by Chen refused static ontologies (23) and presented a more open reading that can be endlessly dissembled and remixed. 

One of the challenging factors was that Chen allows “animacy” to become an increasingly slippery term throughout the book. However this “slippery” quality of the term allows for exploring the porousness between categories and hierarchies. “Animacies interrogates how the fragile division between animate and inanimate- that is, beyond human and animal- is relentlessly produced and policed and maps important political consequences of that distinctions” (4)

Animacy helps theorize “current anxieties around the production of humanness in contemporary times, particularly with regards to humanity’s partners in definitional crime, and activates new theoretical formations that trouble and undo stubborn binary systems of difference. In its more sensitive figurations, animacy has the capacity to rewrite conditions of intimacy, endangering different communalisms and revising biopolitical spheres, or, at least, how we might theorize them. (3)

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One of the aspects of Chen’s text that is not very clear to me is her idea of the destabilizing figure of the animal-without-genitals as an affective counterpart to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s body-without-organs.